The word ‘architecture’ always and immediately brings to mind subjects like real estate, home, high-rises, heritage and monuments. However this is sadly a very limited view on architecture, and one could also say a misguided understanding of what ‘architecture’ means. As an extension to this limited and partly faulty understanding of ‘architecture’, the architect remains to be a technician of sorts — someone who has technical knowledge of certain subjects and who uses that to the best of his capacity to ‘make buildings’. In a more romantic understanding the architect tends to be the maverick artist who has put together marvels and embodiments of beauty in brick and stone or concrete and steel. In more contemporary times, where real estate is the only logic to urban development and financial graphs have crazy rises and drastic falls, architect remains only a service-provider in most cases. He, and sometimes she, is expected to make sure the size of the kitchen or work-station is correct to an optimum, the light falls in the right direction, the water drains well, there is some fancy play of colours and materials which can be discussed as the creative quotient of the project and finally a building should ‘look good and sassy’ in advertisements for the people on the street. The architect’s job is done, he can move to the next project and reproduce the same set of correct applications, with a change of some ‘creative’ inputs, and buildings can be rubber-stamped one after the other, still looking different as every exterior is made just to do that — look different!
Having said this, one can also look at the use of the word ‘architect’ — Jawaharlal Nehru is referred to as the ‘architect’ of modern India, or Dr. B. R. Ambedkar is the ‘architect’ of India’s Constitution, or Mahatma Gandhi is the ‘architect’ of India’s struggle to freedom from British rule. In all these cases, the term ‘architect’ is no technician, is no maverick artist, is no façade designer; the architect, clearly in all these instances, is someone who has shouldered responsibility and has been the shape-giver to important ideas — modern nation, constitution and a movement. The term is not engineer of modern India or doctor of the freedom movement, but ‘architect’ is the idea that is used. So then what defines an architect? What job does an architect do? What role does he perform in society? And the answer to all these will depend on — What is architecture?
Architecture is surely a profession at one point, with the architect a trained and licensed professional who is expected to provide a certain set of services to the best of his capacity. However, architecture is also a discipline — it is a subject with its own history, its theory and its ideas on issues of space, beauty, cultural interventions, role within a social set-up, cultural implications, etc. Architecture deals with making of buildings, but it is much beyond the building — architecture is a broad field of ideas and practices. Architecture has always had historians and theorists, critics and writers who discuss architecture and challenge the contemporary practices of their times. So the realm of ideas and thoughts, theories and critical propositions also makes up the world of architecture. Just as the knowledge of materials and plumbing is important to architecture, so is the awareness of issues and theories that challenge the field is very important. One can say, that from nuts and bolts to the realm of dreams, architecture has to deal with it all.
Architects also work within their own peer pressures. The architect trained in a particular set of ideas and principles of design, is also living and working in particular contexts. Contexts are made up of cultural images, political inclinations, social relationships that you may or may not agree with. These contexts and the architect’s training generates influences on the design board where decisions are judged against popular imaginations, economic constraints, hyped practices like vaastu, personal convictions or lack of it, and desires or aspirations of clients. The studio of the architect is a complex combination of strains and stresses, desires and convictions. Who is the architect addressing his/her questions and designs to – the client, the user (who she/he may never meet), the fraternity, the critic, the economic demands, space crunch, real estate wars, technicians that supply plumbing and electricity? As much as this dilemma is a reality of conditions, and as much as we realise how architecture stretches much beyond making a ‘good building’, the question is not simply a technical issue of how many questions and demands an architect can answer satisfactorily. The point that needs investigation is — what is the idea of architecture that we as thinkers and professionals in the field of architecture subscribe to. Do we understand our responsibility towards ‘architecture’ itself, to begin with?
Architecture is a realm where imaginations and values will have to be resolved. How do universal values of humanity translate into architectural values and imaginations? To acknowledge that architecture operates as the physical fabric within which our homes, neighbourhoods and cities are defined is very crucial. This physical fabric constructs the way we imagine our world, and this physical fabric is inherently visual and material — we see it and we feel it. The visual as well as the material is always a coded logic — if the Mughals used white marble it was to imagine the sense of beauty within the sense of grandeur that political and pristine, making the political an aspect of technology and geometry; if the new stock of corporate towers feel the need to shine in the hot sun as they shoot to crazy heights, tallness and brightness mean something — aspirations to unashamedly compete, rather make competition a value and loudness of domination a virtue is what this architecture signals. Is then at times the patron, the developer, the client the real designer, the real architect? Is then the architect simply a handmaiden to the forces that make his profession possible? But then can the architect simply moan his status in the chain and continue being the handmaiden? Does architecture have the power to reject and change that which is given and practised in the world? Or does architecture simply mirror the culture and society that produces it?
Architecture is a condition much more than a building here and a building there. Architecture, especially with the world taking an urban turn is the site where ideas and cultures are shaped and human societies are constantly shaping and re-shaping. Architecture is no stage for the drama of life, but a constant game-player in this scenario. Architecture, as a dynamic set of ideas and elements, is part of the narrative that we call culture and socio-political world. Whether new buildings are built, or some old ones are conserved, and some others are lost in time, or whether housing in the avatar of slums is demolished — architecture is constantly shaping and redefining itself. One of the most crucial aspects of architecture — Space, is one of the most cov-eted and discussed subject. Space of the family or the space in your colony or mohalla, or the space from where hawkers are thrown out in the name of discipline or beautification, or the space of mills converted to tall apartment blocks — are the versions of space that architecture choreographs and gives it a logic and a language. The architect can be the handmaiden and provide an architectural language that feeds into the popular idea of life and the world provided today by globalization and capitalism, else that architect can use his skills and language of architecture to challenge the dominant ideas. With the design of better homes, flush with appliances and its interiors designed with high-end materials, does family life automatically become better and more affectionate? The idea of architecture constantly weaves through all these situations and events; then is architecture a physical structure any longer or is it just about events and reactions? The sociality of life, as much as it is embedded in architecture, also seems disjointed from the generally and commonly appreciated properties of architecture.
Does the idea of architecture — a discursive field of knowledge on the one hand, a profession on the other — accommodate the notion of ethics? Ethics here is not an issue of morality, but one of integrated principles and convictions guided by vision and a critical understanding of the world and life. Principles are not meant to be stringent and unchanging, but they are guidelines that can be adequately and appropriately changed, redefined and interrogated. Convictions need not be misunderstood as rigid belief, but convictions is a tool box of imaginations and critical argumentation that is built up through a keen observation of life and culture, and a constantly reworked understanding of one’s own field. Visions are not dogmatic and cast-in-stone diagrams, but they should be projections of ideas that can generate a dialogue and argument, that can make us see the world with fresh eyes but not forget that we come from a past that is loaded with dreams and nightmares. Ethics of architecture help us build arguments and methods towards a world, a city that is other wise a chaotic mix of loud voices — demolitions, developments, change, preserve, conserve, beautify. These words for most of us are only images and not concepts that mean certain real-life situations. These words will become valuable ideas to be discussed and debated when a sense of ethics is the basis for their existence.
Architectural ethics are not about which colour looks good, or which building has a fancier façade than the other, but architectural ethics is a way to our understanding of what world and society do we wish to live in. Can we talk of sustainable environments and economies while we view the hawker on the roadside only as a nuisance? Hawking is an essentially urban condition, that produces a set of urban values and conditions, which are also part of existing economic networks. But hawking is also an understanding of values in space, the architecture of reuse and repair. Are gated communities with taller and taller high-rises packed behind tall compound walls and gates the future of living? Have we not enjoyed mohallas and padas where sharing spaces with neighbours and shopkeepers was a way family and city life developed? A sense of architectural ethics will give us ways in which we can innovatively address some old issues. To question the idea of architecture is central to establishing relationships in a society and understanding them. No human life, and no human social or cultural group lives in isolation — with our different eating habits and different religious preferences, we still are a species that needs exchange and interaction with others who are not like yourself to survive a wholesome life.
Architectural ethics of sharing space, understanding quotients of privacy and openness is very important to a healthy social world-space.
Whether we look at questions of women and social space, or issues of caste and cultural space, or theatre and the traditions of space and costume, or whether we simply evaluate how we perceive shared and public space like a railway station in Mumbai or a park or a maidan, we will realise that architecture deals with aspects of value and ethics as much as it deals with scale, colour and materials. The architect is the builder, he is the thinker, he is also often a philosopher — but in the world of today this bleeding of different roles is also the cause for dilemmas and confusions. But these dilemmas need to be occasions for asking questions and thinking — where new meanings for architecture could be discovered, debated and argued. The new meanings will provide new occasions and new tools for the architect to work with. As long as a sense of ethics and values in architecture is understood, the architect can remodel his profession and his field, with growing understanding and an evolving vision.
